News Room

10/17/2005 REFRIGERATED TRADE REVIEW FRUITS & VEGETABLES 2005

Turbana banana carrier adds Costa Rica to Freeport service

By Paul Scott Abbott, AJOT

Already having fortuitously moved operations from Gulfport months before Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, the ocean carrier best known for hauling Turbana bananas from Colombia is now adding a Costa Rica call to its Gulf service, which has been experiencing substantial growth since making its primary destination Port Freeport, Texas.

Beginning with an Oct. 19 sailing from Puerto Limon, Isabella Shipping Co. Ltd. vessels are to include the Costa Rican port in its weekly Gulf service. Puerto Limon is not a new port for Isabella, as it has long been called by the line in its highest-volume service, which links Colombian banana plantations to the Port of Bridgeport, CT.

"Everything has happened faster than what we expected," said Carlos I. Agudelo, operations manager for Coral Gables, FL-based Interoceanica Agency Inc., agents for Isabella Shipping. Both Isabella and Turbana are units of C.I. Union de Bananeros de Uraba, SA, the Colombian banana growers‚ firm commonly known as Uniban.

While Isabella officials had high expectations for Freeport, including for a just-completed waterfront cool storage facility, they could not have known when they signed a five-year agreement last fall with Port Freeport that Katrina would level Gulfport in August - four months after Isabella’s Gulf call switch from Gulfport to Freeport took place.

By that time, P&O Ports, which handles stevedoring services for Isabella at Port Freeport, had already moved equipment to handle the firm’s needs to Freeport from Gulfport.

"We were very lucky that we made the move right on time," Agudelo said. "We evacuated‚ ahead of time."

The Gulfport destruction has since led green fruit importers Dole Fresh Fruit Co. and Chiquita Brand Inc. to shift their Gulfport business to Freeport. Both Dole and Chiquita already were longtime customers of Port Freeport, for 20 years and 10 years, respectively, but had split their Gulf imports between the Texas and Mississippi ports.

Those hurricane-precipitated shifts of Dole and Chiquita’s containerized banana imports have caused Port Freeport to go from importing about 300 containers a week to a rate of between 1,000 and 1,200 containers per week, according to A.J. "Pete" Reixach, Jr., Port Freeport’s executive port director. The port has responded by augmenting areas for the laydown of containers and the queuing of trucks.

Isabella continues to rely primarily upon breakbulk shipping of bananas on pallets rather than using containers, according to Agudelo. But he said that Isabella is beginning to add some containers while competitors are part of the trend toward combination offerings as well, mixing some palletized loads with their traditionally containerized volumes.

Both of the vessels Isabella now has deployed in its Gulf service are configured primarily for palletized shipments but do have limited container capacities, Agudelo noted. Those two vessels - the M/V Magnific and the M/V Maveric - each have carrying capacities of some 2,500 tons of cargo per voyage, about one-and-one-half times the capacities of the ships Isabella had until recently deployed in the Gulf service.

The increase in capacity has helped bring about the Costa Rica call. Goods to be loaded at Puerto Limon include such refrigerated cargoes as bananas, pineapples, seasonal melons and root vegetables.

Officials representing Isabella and Port Freeport are slated to promote the new service Nov. 1 through 4 in a trade mission event sponsored in San Jose, Costa Rica, by Procomer, the Costa Rican Foreign-Trade Corp. In early August, Isabella Shipping and Port Freeport cosponsored a business matchmaking forum in Houston that focused upon Colombian business opportunities.

Thus far, the southbound voyages from Freeport have carried export cargoes including paper rolls, linerboard and plastic resins to the Colombian port

 Cartagena before the vessels head over to Turbo to pick up northbound bananas. Every third week, the Isabella Gulf service skips the Cartagena call in favor of a call at Tampa to pick up export used vehicles.

Agudelo is enthusiastic about the Gulf service in that it is characterized by significant volumes both northbound and southbound. In the case of the Bridgeport service, Isabella’s pair of 4,300-ton-capacity ships sail northward laden with fruit but return with little cargo other than small amounts of Canadian peat moss used in Colombia’s flower industry and a few trucks.

Agudelo said expansion had been part of Isabella’s long-range plan for Freeport, but the carrier has had such a favorable early experience, including with labor and with port officials, that the larger vessels and the Costa Rica call have been put in place sooner than anticipated.

The service expansion also has led Isabella Shipping to appoint a Gulf Coast sales agent, Nkargo Logistics LLC., based in the Houston suburb of The Woodlands, effective this month. Although Nkargo is a newly created entity, its sales manager, Juan Ariztmendy, is no stranger to the industry, having worked for a Colombia-based maritime agency representing several carriers, for Miami-based non-vessel-operating common carrier Econocaribe Consolidators Inc. and for a Houston trucking company.

Asked what commodities are being solicited for the Gulf service, Ariztmendy noted that, while the vessels feature refrigerated capacity, potential cargoes being targeted also include Costa Rican handcrafts and computer parts northbound and, southbound, "everything we can put on it."

Port Freeport’s managing director, Phyllis Saathoff, commented, "When we initially were talking with the people of Turbana and Isabella, we learned that one of the reasons they liked Port Freeport is because they saw potential for new business. We are delighted to see their vision for growth become a reality."

Is there further service expansion on the horizon?

"Who knows?" Agudelo replied. "I think things happen at the right time."